NEW YORK: Wall Street’s main indexes rose on Friday ahead of a long weekend, with the blue-chip Dow hitting a record high for the first time since the Iran war began, as investors tracked progress in talks to end the nearly three-month-old conflict.
The S&P 500 is on track for an eighth consecutive weekly gain, which would mark its best winning streak since December 2023.
Most megacap and growth stocks traded higher, with Apple up 2 percent, hitting a market capitalization of more than USD4.5 trillion for the first time.
Semiconductor stocks, a key driver of recent Wall Street gains, were broadly up with the Philadelphia chip index rising 2.4 percent. Qualcomm led the pack with a 12 percent jump.
PC makers Dell Technologies and HP Inc surged over 15 percent each after China’s Lenovo Group reported a better-than-expected 27 percent jump in quarterly revenue.
In the latest on the Iran situation, Reuters reported that a Qatari negotiating team arrived in Tehran in coordination with the United States to try to help secure a deal to end the war and resolve outstanding issues.
“The market has been working under the assumption that there’s going to be relatively near-term resolution,” said Thomas Hayes, chairman at Great Hill Capital LLC.
“If that assumption proves to be wrong, the market will catch down very quickly. The market has been trained that there’s an embedded Trump put in the market.”
Global stocks have whipsawed since the conflict began in late February, but hopes of an eventual resolution to the war, optimism in the AI trade and resilient earnings growth have propelled US stocks to record highs this month.
The market recovery, however, has faced some hurdles as investors fret about the inflationary impact of surging oil prices, pushing government bond yields higher around the world and hitting risk appetite this week.
At 11:34 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 408.59 points, or 0.82 percent, to 50,697.24, the S&P 500 gained 48.08 points, or 0.65 percent, to 7,493.79 and the Nasdaq Composite gained 174.66 points, or 0.67 percent, to 26,467.76.
Seven out of the 11 major S&P 500 sector indexes were higher, led by information technology.
Meanwhile, government bond yields were steady after Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said the Fed should axe the “easing bias” from its policy statement and effectively open the door to a possible rate hike.
Kevin Warsh will be sworn in as Fed leader at the White House later in the day, taking over the reins from Jerome Powell, a pivotal moment for monetary policy and the American economy.
The CBOE volatility index hit a more than two-week low ahead of the three-day market holiday, with US markets shut on Monday for Memorial Day.
Meanwhile, the price-weighted Dow notched its first intraday record high since February 10, becoming the last of the three main US stock indexes to hit the milestone.
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